The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  And yet—

  Evidence of another kind here in my hand.

  As if a back wall in the Queen’s Arms opened and I went through it to find him pacing beside a meditative pond. If not Walden, at least Toogood.

  After the quotations section, the book is organized into a series of short entries, many less than a page long, each one titled and dated. I don’t know if it matters whether I read them in order. Collage seems more the principle behind their arrangement. Each complete in itself, but gathering meaning by association with its neighbours. Nevertheless, I begin at the beginning. Read it straight through, quickly, then return to the start.

  Out of simmering unease 31 May

  Out of simmering unease, weeks of it, a plain question. So sudden it makes you gasp. Where—who—would you be without someone to care for? Anywhere? Anybody?

  It arrives in the shower on a wretched morning. Depression is the occupying power now. Anti-depression, a dispersed guerilla band, must resort to ambush.

  Talking—so long ago—with other boys about Robinson Crusoe. How he survived all their absorption—healthily. While your puzzlement, your amazement even, veered already to why. Alone and pointless on the island. Why not a sharp clamshell and out? A secret to keep—this question. You knew in the moment of thinking it.

  “Don’t listen too closely to exhaustion,” L says. “It will speak in a hundred voices, say a thousand things. But it only ever has one message: ‘Rest.’” A wise, good woman.

  Still, as evening and soft rain fall, the question lingers. Lingers and reverberates. A shot across the bow. Hardly the first.

  But closer. Closer each time.

  Let’s get smashed 1 June

  Let’s get smashed.

  His statement of intent at cocktail hour. Sometimes with a grin. A fist pump. Or just, on occasion, matter-of-factly. An alcohol athlete’s quiet discipline.

  How I miss him sometimes! Fiercely, in sudden attacks or spells that leave me weak afterwards. Often for the same things I feared him for all my life.

  The gestures and words that fell me with longing are the same ones that gave me the constant jitters in his presence.

  Remembered presence pierces a screen, an overgrowth, a shell—cracks a hole, through which the past blazes. And is not past.

  Weakness, afterwards. A frailness, dream-likeness, about what I am about.

  It is so terribly hard to believe in death.

  §

  A bang on the door startles me out of reverie. No need to ask who it is. Only one person announces himself that way: one thud of a closed fist. As if any gentler or more prolonged summons would injure his dignity.

  Beside the Owner stands another, younger Owner. A possible purchaser of the building interested in taking a look around. It’s the first I’ve heard of it—but then, why would I be informed? Despite having different facial features, they might be carbon copies. Suits of slightly different cut and colour assert the same level of class, of membership. As do the quality haircuts: one a rich white, the other silver and black—but the same careful shaping twice a month. Though I see him only once or twice a year, my Owner changes remarkably little. Aging coddles him, leading him by pinsteps to a handsome viewing.

  “This is the Super,” he says. As a farmer would say to another inspecting his land: This is my scarecrow. Knock him down, or keep him, when the field is yours. In the meantime, patchy as he is, he scares some birds. Adding to me, “Someone’s made a mess on the wall beside the garage.” I nod, to show how his wind makes my head sway, activating my button eyes and my grim, stitched mouth.

  And, after a few more words to the other, he leaves.

  Showing the potential buyer around the five floors, then the basement garage and utilities room, I make sure he sees, while pretending to hide, some of the sixty-year-old building’s defects. Crumbling plaster mouldings in the underlit hallways. Patches of bubbling paint from insidious damp. Gouges and scratches and scuff marks in the halls and stairwells, clustered from waist to shoulder height, legacies of many hasty departures. The many windows—the middle three apartments on each floor—facing into the wall of the Favorite or the Latimer—with only the end units offering a view of Eglinton or houses with treed yards. The undersized water heater, rust spots at its base. The bumpy, pitted garage floor, its concrete eroded by overhead dripping and flash floods down the entrance slope.

  I could show him more, of course. And should. His eager investor’s face is fading—its brightness dimming, glumness overtaking it—and I should do everything in my power to hasten its collapse. If a new Owner installs a new scarecrow, where in the city will I live on eight hundred a month? Under Snag’s bench? In Mrs. Rasmussen’s laundry room?

  But I can’t rise to the practical matter of looking after myself. This deep into an adjustment, this far into a window, the future is too unreal. Even at the best of times, it’s only a few prudent hedges against disaster. Keeping clear of glass as lightning approaches, quickening your steps ahead of an oncoming truck—these hardly qualify as long-term planning. Basic battenings of hatches, so as not to seduce catastrophe: that’s the level of my care.

  “Christmas Music” blots my mind to Owner finagling. So do the dead and living mingling underground, shuffling around stairs that lead yet further down.

  And so, too, does Around Toogood Pond. Musing about the voice in it—the book turned over in my lap—when the Owner’s rude bang fetched me back from a long way away.

  A different voice. Different from any I’ve heard. At least in this adjustment. Someone in crisis and looking, looking actively, for help. Pleading for it. With courage, but also with humility. Humility. Probably the last word I’d associate with the Wyverns. Not even with Judy, who crumbles inside a shell of defensive arrogance—who is condemned to make others ghostly, crepuscular, in order to deal with them at all.

  The slickster in his Rolex-running office. Digging in people’s mouths. Trapping them in his camera.

  The burly baby in the bar. Black fishpond eyes. Ladykiller. Scribe on the side.

  Surprises, new views, all around.

  Still… a difference here. Here in this voice. What?

  Something not yet spoiled.

  §

  Mid-afternoon, I head out. Breaking my resolve to stay put all day, I make an absurdly early supper, jazz ticking away. A quiet composition for just bass and drums, throbs on a couple of notes while sticks tick rapidly against the kit rims. Double-time of a heart fused to detonate. Melt the broth block, warm it to bubbling, add the baggie of chopped vegetables. Boil the ramen, rinse. Add them. Watching it all, thoughtlessly. Thrums and ticking.

  A long drive that also contravenes management protocol. Two hours of here and there, up and down. Wasting gas in the service of no errand, no search. Just to get to dark.

  Dusk finally settling, I pull up near Woodbine Beach. Walk the empty boardwalk, deserted save for a couple of power walkers pumping wrist weights. Strike out past the beach volleyball poles, across an expanse of sand and damp flats sprigged with grass. Climb the hill into the trees and curving asphalt pathways.

  Opposite the inlet with the moored boats, a shoreline tumble of squarish boulders, like giant play blocks. Nearly always deserted, and is so now. Settle low among the nightcool rocks, back to one, a waiting throne. Sighting south across the giant, wave-chopped lake.

  Night arrives.

  Freighter far out, hung with lights. Plume of whitish smoke thins quickly in the wind, detaches from the ship. Wisp after wisp. Brief, fading signals. Dandelion filaments, departing one by one.

  Curious how the book ends abruptly. A last entry, nothing special about it, and turn to a blank page. No closure, summation, conclusion, epilogue. Even treating the book as a collage—returning again and again to bits that glitter out at me—I was expecting a more definitive wrap-up.

  And many
of the last scenes peaceful. Placid almost to the point of complacency. Especially after the desperation early on. A short description of riding with his mother around Unionville. November. The pond walk too cold. The colours Maude loved done. And her increasing difficulty staying upright, even with the walker. Motor skills going, balance going. She prefers to drive around looking at the big, well-kept homes.

  “These are likable houses,” she remarks at one point. And the author comments on the strangeness of the words she recalls as well as forgets. Her sudden surprising eloquences, dotting aphasic stretches like reeds in a spreading desert. Like her “profound” on another day.

  But reading—reading over his shoulder, so to speak, for who else will see these reflections delivered to the bank’s charity bin?—you wonder if the author hasn’t missed something more than accidental eloquence.

  These are likable houses.

  What you say maybe if you’re thinking of houses—homes—that aren’t likable. Never could be. And not necessarily her present home either. After all, she was looking at what most people would consider dream homes—solid, spacious. Brightly painted and decorated, landscaped impeccably. Like the one she raised her children in probably. But likable.

  Making my way back, across and down the grassy rise, leaving the paths to cut between pines and spruce trees. Their needles fragrant in the dark. Startled sounds from clumps of bushes, scuttlings in close-knit groves. Sparks from cigarette ends, from a small furtive fire. Clank of bottles, an urgent whisper as I near. Silence as I pass. And then the reassured giggles, a male voice cracking wise, reclaiming the dark den with its females.

  Every sound a spark. Spotted flares I wend through to stay dark.

  The beach, palely glowing without moonlight, a great scorched plain. Likable houses. The more I think of it, the more it gives me a chill. Like the chill I felt looking at “Christmas Music”—a chill that seemed to come not from the pictures into me, but from my bones out, seeping to meet it. But along with the chill, battling it, someone trying to stay warm in a meat locker. For days I’ve thought of the Wyverns in terms of rot. Bad smells. Stains. Crawling things. But isn’t cold the true sense you get from them? Like breaths from an open refrigerator when you stand near it. Cold of something missing. Nothing colder than a vacuum. Maude under her blanket, Judy placing her crossing talismans. Fuel for the ferry over frigid black.

  Cold. Corrupt. Crypt. In crypt. Encrypt. All terms meet.

  How you know an adjustment is brewing.

  §

  I park the car in my spot in the garage, pause on the lobby stairs and head back out. Still not ready to rise to the eyrie I said I wouldn’t leave today. I set out on a twenty-minute walk, the big lopsided rectangle up Chaplin, across Roselawn and down Latimer to the short bar of Eglinton. Midway along Roselawn, however, where the streetlights fail outside the Jewish cemetery, I change routes and cut down the path, gravestones behind wrought iron to either side, that ends at North Preparatory Junior Public School. Where election cards tell me I’d vote, if I voted. With difficulty I scale the fence, locked at sundown against vandals who topple stones, deface them. Hebrew squiggles and bars on a sign above—just shapes to me. Good. Signs among graves should be inscrutable.

  A path, a ribbon, through the sleeping dead. Where two trees arch darkly over the exit gate, playground equipment on asphalt beyond, I pause. All day the dream that woke me before dawn has returned in vivid slivers, taking on a title in my mind as if it were a book I’d read: Dream of the Exquisite Fetters. Once again, it comes back—the people shuffling and mingling in the dim grainy light, me trying to cut the elaborate metal sleeves from their wrists, snipping off Maude’s finger instead—but this time it returns with a difference, a way of seeing it so altered it stops me in my tracks.

  Fetters, I called the patterned metal sleeves. It was the word they came with in the dream. But fetters are to bind, to restrain, and Maude and her husband moved their arms freely. And fetters? Rusty iron shackles in old movies, or, in modern ones, serviceable steel. Not chased and filigreed bands of precious metals. Not exquisite.

  Where would you find such things? On the arms of ancient warriors, in their tombs.

  No one in those underground rooms asked me, not by word or sign, to remove the metal sleeves. I went to work with my shears—shears that left welts and lopped-off parts—because I thought the need for release was understood. Was it, though?

  They could be saying, with their precious metal sleeves, not Release me, but See. This much I gained. This much I won. They could be saying that.

  That or another message. Or many messages. Or none. None fathomable to me.

  And yet your answer is to mangle the precious bands? Lop off a finger? Stopped between the graves and swing set, barred from both, I feel, as if they are tangible things standing with me, solitude and strangeness. And recognize too, as if it is my oldest friend, my infinite capacity to be a fool. A fool whose folly it is to descend into darknesses I don’t understand and wrestle there with powers I’m not remotely equipped to reckon with. Only to blunder about in hobnail boots, breaking, breaking…

  As the adjustment builds to what it must…

  11

  I meet the Empress on the second level down.

  After a first steep flight, the stairs become more shallow and begin a gentle curve. They are wider too. She is sitting in a niche in the wall near the bottom. Sitting in a high-backed chair—tiny as she is, and straight-spined, she looks enthroned, which must be why The Empress flies into my mind. Peering down to find my footing in the gloom, I almost miss her.

  She shows her face in shadowed profile. A half, two-thirds of it perhaps, with a somewhat flattened aspect, like that of a playing card, which may be a function of the dim, grainy light that robs things of dimension. White wispy hair straggles to her shoulders on the side facing me, bare scalp shining through it. Her skin finely wrinkled like tissue paper folded and unfolded innumerable times—but then smoother where it crosses the bridge of her nose and where her forehead merges with shadow. Her hair too—unless I am mistaken—begins to change on the far side, becoming thicker, yellow mixing with the sickly white. But I can only see the start of this.

  She wears a simple white shift, high-collared, which falls past her feet. She is very tiny. If I used all my strength, and made a plate of my outstretched palms, I think she could sit or stand upon it.

  The single eye turned to me regards me with a terrible intensity. No expression in it I can read. Just a pure, fixed, unwavering gaze.

  My eyes flinch from it, rove up and down the stairs. But the movements, the restless shiftings above and below, have stopped. The people I met above, and the ones I sensed below, have moved further into the shadows and gone still. They are afraid of her, I realize. She emanates a power that clears spaces around her. I feel it keenly myself, along with an urge to climb up or down, to put more distance between us. But I can’t move. I’m stuck here with her.

  With the thought comes the realization that she is trying to turn. There is a quivering tension in her chin and delicate jawbone, a straining. It is partly this concentration of effort that gives such implacable intensity to her eye, vacated by everything but the will to turn.

  Yet, as my eyes adjust a little to the gloom, I see what makes her struggle impossible. The far side of her partially turned chair and body are fused with the stone. She is part of the niche, grown into it. What I am seeing is the part that still remains free, trying with an unceasing effort to break loose or at least resist the pull toward greater incorporation.

  §

  A butterfly wing 29 July

  “My inspiration,”she used to call it. “My,” she still says fondly, “my”—but can’t retrieve a word as long as inspiration. Nor does she add the explanation she used to, especially in the hard days (hard years!) at Rosewell. “If that little thing can fly all that way and back again, t
hen surely I can get through my…”—trailing off without specifying what it was she had to get through.

  It sits on her bedside table at Vivera. The piece of her I most want to keep when she is gone. Though sometimes—not very often—I will find it stuffed in a bureau drawer, socks and used Kleenex pulled over it. Next visit it will be out again.

  She must have been in her sixties when she found it, lying on the ground at the cottage. A single monarch butterfly wing. A mark of her, to pick up and preserve it. Who else would have?

  L framed it perfectly, in a four-by-four-inch shadow box with a border of dark wood. The single, orange-and-black-veined wing, floating behind glass. A thing detached, alone, and yet not senseless. A remnant of flight. An emblem of it. And of fragile beauty preserved.

  And, too, “my butterfly” is the name she hit on long ago for J. “Always flitting, always restless. Touching down… and then off she goes again.”

  The nickname angered J in younger years, though it might not now, when she is trying to come to terms with the inner furies that whirl her from place to place, situation to situation. Coming to terms? Or just growing quieter, worn out by the long fight?

  “She knew,” J says one day, completely lucidly. “A mother always knows.”

  I’m not so sure of that. In fact I have no opinion about it, either way. And no way of ever knowing, now.

  I only know Mom used the name “butterfly” for the daughter her husband had wronged so deeply. The daughter who left home one morning at age fifteen. And should have left, or been taken, at least a dozen years earlier. What a catastrophe! friends said, honest well-wishers, when she was diagnosed. But catastrophes come also as blessings to the crimes they disguise.